[Comment] Offline: Planetary health—the great acceleration

March 15, 2017

The Lancet 389, 10073 (2017)

Author: Richard Horton

“Eviscerate it!” Laurie Garrett was at her most pugnacious. She was speaking last week at the New York headquarters of the Rockefeller Foundation. Her subject was Planetary Health 2.0 and her target was the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), specifically its work on health. Yes, humans are of course sensitive to weather. Yes, existing health problems will get worse as the climate crisis gets worse. But she wasn’t buying the IPCC’s conclusion that “the present worldwide burden of ill health from climate change is relatively small compared with other stressors on health”.